Conclusion

The reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought on offer in this book is novel in three main ways. First, it views Schopenhauer as a more faithful Kantian than most commentators have been apt to recognize. Second, it sees Schopenhauer’s philosophy as an evolving rather than static body of thought. Third, it claims that there are really two Schopenhauers—The Knight of Despair and the Knight with Hope—and this distinction helps to capture the real incompatibilities between the resignationist and the compassionate moral realist sides of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought. This reconstructed version of Schopenhauer’s ethical theory—compassionate moral realism—provides an interesting option for the contemporary ethical-theoretical landscape. A Schopenhauerian value ontology of degrees of inherent value puts this theory into the animal rights camp, but in a more moderate way—closer to Mary Anne Warren’s “weak animal rights” position, rather than Tom Regan’s strong theory of animal rights.

Educating Emotions

Chapter 9 rehearses Aristotle’s somewhat unsystematic remarks about emotion education. Moreover, the chapter subjects to critical scrutiny six different discourses on emotion education in addition to Aristotle’s: care ethics; social and emotional learning; positive psychology; emotion-regulation discourse; academic-emotions discourse; and social intuitionism. Four differential criteria are used to analyse the content of the discourses: valence of emotions to be educated; value ontology; general aims of emotion education; and self-related goals. Possible criticisms of all the discourses are presented. Subsequently, seven strategies of emotion education (behavioural strategies; ethos modification and emotion contagion; cognitive reframing; service learning/habituation; direct teaching; role modelling; and the arts) are introduced to explore how the seven discourses avail themselves of each strategy. It is argued that there is considerably more convergence in the practical strategies than there is in the theoretical underpinnings of the seven discourses.

El valor de uso y la crítica total de la sociedad moderna en la lectura de El capital, de Marx, que propone Bolívar Echeverría

For more than three decades, use value and revolution are the focus of Bolivar Echeverria’s reflection. Echeverria constantly ponders this axis that gives continuity to his work and his thought. In this reworking, he created one of his most important essays, “Natural form of Social Reproduction”, first published in 1984 and then, in a new version, under the title of “Use Value: Ontology and Semiotics”, in 1998. A comparison between the two versions shows differences of detail, but, really, these are changes in theoretical and political perspective of Echeverria. Considered more closely, these differences development fundamental problems, and it promises progress for critical thinking. In these notes I try to clarify this promise.

The Human Semantic Web

This chapter introduces the human Semantic Web (HSW) as a conceptual interface, providing human-understandable semantics in addition to the ordinary (machine) Semantic Web, which provides machine-processable semantics based on RDF. The HSW is structured in the form of a knowledge manifold and makes use of uni-fied language modeling (based on the unified modeling language) combined with conceptual browsing to present its information to the user in a way that creates substantial benefits in terms of overview, clarity, and flexibility. The HSW browser Conzilla combines the semantics of RDF with the human-understandable semantics of UML in order to enable more powerful forms of human-computer interaction, such as querying the Semantic Web through Edutella and supporting the conceptin-context methodology. The Semantic Web is discussed in terms of three levels of semantic interoperability: isolation, coexistence, and collaboration. Collaboration, as the highest goal, can be achieved by conceptual calibration, which builds bridges between different ontologies in a bottom-up way, describing their similarities as well as their differences. An example is presented in Conzilla of conceptual calibration between systems for e-commerce. In the closing section, the Nonaka-Takeuchi theory of knowledge creation is discussed, and the HSW is described as a “space for interaction,” where the SECI spiral of knowledge creation can be elevated to the global level. Three possible scenarios are presented: open research, enriching the economy by expanding the value ontology, and negotiating a sustainable future for all.